I see the point you're trying to make, however the increase in features (and their complexity) plus the size of the average graphic that a high-end professional has maybe grown by 300-500% since the 90s. In fact I'll tell you what: I'll give you a growth of 10,000% in file sizes and feature complexity since the since the 90s...
... computational power has grown ~%259,900 since the 90s.
The point being made is this: Photoshop does one job and has one focus should), yet it has gotten slower at doing that one job and not faster. Optimising the code AND introducing incredibly hardware to the consumer market should see Photoshop loading in milliseconds, in my opinion.
>The point being made is this: Photoshop does one job and has one focus should), yet it has gotten slower at doing that one job and not faster.
Has it though? Without measurements this is just idle talk.
And I've used Photoshop in the 90s and I use it today ocassionally. I remember having 90s sized web pictures (say, 1024x768) and waiting for a filter to be applied for tens of seconds - which I get instantly today with 24MP and more...
And if we're into idle talk I've always found Photoshop faster in large images and projects than competitors, including "lightweight" ones.
It's hella more optimized than them.
In any case, some e.g. image filter application (that takes, e.g. 20 seconds vs 1 minute with them) just calls some optimized C++ code (perhaps with some asm thrown in) that does just that.
The rest of the "bloat" (in the UI, feature count, etc) has absolutely no bearing as to whether a filter or an operation (like blend, crop, etc) runs fast or not. At worst, it makes going around in the UI to select the operations you want slower.
And in many cases the code implementing a basic operation, filter, etc, hasn't even been changed since 2000 or so (if anything, it was optimized further, taken to use the GPU, etc).
I recall my dad requiring overnight sessions to have Photoshop render a particular filter on his Pentium 166MHz. That could easily take upwards of an hour, and a factor 10 more for the final edit. He'd be working on one photo for a week.
To me it feels as though the last decade and a half computational power has not grown vertically. Instead Intel and AMD have grown computational power horizontally (i.e adding more cores). I'm looking at the difference the M1 has had on compute performance as a sign X86 strayed.
It has also grown substantially vertically: single-core speeds keep going up (about 10x from a decade and a half ago), even as core count increases. (and M1 is not substantially faster than the top x86 cores, the remarkable thing is how power efficient it is at those speeds).
Clock speed != single-threaded performance. Clock speeds plateaued a long time ago, single threaded performance is still improving exponentially (by being able to execute multiple instructions in an instruction stream in parallel, as well as execute the same instructions in less clock cycles), though the exponent approximately halved around 2004 (if the trend had continued we would be at about a 100-500x improvement by now).
Hard to say it's still "exponential"...what do you think the current constant doubling period is now?
Here's the single thread raw data from that repo. If you take into account clock speed increase (which, as you agree, have plateaued) we're looking at maybe a 2x increase in instructions per clock for conventional int (not vectorized) workloads.
Is there even another 2x IPC increase possible? At any time scale?
... computational power has grown ~%259,900 since the 90s.
The point being made is this: Photoshop does one job and has one focus should), yet it has gotten slower at doing that one job and not faster. Optimising the code AND introducing incredibly hardware to the consumer market should see Photoshop loading in milliseconds, in my opinion.